I recently paid a visit to a nearby grocery store. A year ago, I helped build it. I was returning after a break of a few months. It’s time to pick up some shifts for the spring and summer seasons.
I’ve worked seasonal, retail, and manual labor jobs my entire life. I’m also a journalist, but that doesn’t really pay anymore. I’d just like to say to the thousands of government bureaucrats in my hometown of Washington who are getting laid off during the Department of Government Efficiency purge: Welcome to the real world. It’s not as bad as you think.
In 2024, I was hired to help the new grocery store launch. The store is in Maryland and is part of a larger retail corporation that has seen tremendous growth in the last two decades. A group of about 20 of us were hired to mount shelves, unload truck deliveries, move equipment around, and learn how to bake. One shift started at 4 a.m.
Everyone needs to spend at least one season working a manual labor job. America is the place where all of us — black, white, Asian, Christian, Muslim, and everything else — can go to work and get along, form friendships, and flourish in the free market capitalist system. I know some liberals are appalled by the ”excesses” and “conspicuous consumption” of the United States, but stocking all those rows of spaghetti sauce, seafood, bread, candy, salad, and soup, I just felt gratitude. My Irish ancestors had come here to escape famine and British repression. Freedom is beautiful.
When you spend a few months building a grocery store or working at a home improvement store or a seafood market, all of which I have done, something becomes very clear: America is doing much better than our elites would have you believe. One day at the grocery store, a young guy whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon and I were comparing notes about music. He’s in his 20s, three decades younger than me, but we found common ground on the greatness of Kendrick Lamar, a songwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Lamar started off as a gangster rapper but developed his sound to accommodate more jazz influences.
Stocking frozen dinners and talking to my new friend, it occurred to me: The tolerant, resourceful, future-oriented, and optimistic America was not in the pages of the New York Times or on MSNBC or on Capitol Hill. It was here. I worked with people of all races, ages, and religious beliefs. We all got along, became friends, and had common interests. America is working just fine. Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.
Working manual labor jobs has also made me a better journalist. I was working in a bakery in 2016 when I noticed that several of my Hispanic co-workers, especially the men, loved Donald Trump. I told my editors this and they laughed. Nevertheless, I persisted: “Trump is popular with Latino men,” I said. “He may win a majority of them in the election.”
Working has also made me very sympathetic, indeed supportive, of unions. I’m a political conservative, but when you have to go to work at a gas station or in a deli and you see the difference in wages and how workers are treated in union shops as opposed to nonunion shops, it can make you lurch left very quickly. I have often silenced a room full of conservative think-tankers complaining about the rising minimum wage with a simple question: “What was the last manual labor job you worked?” Silence.
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There once was a time when journalists and even government workers knew actual working-class people. The world of the working class was once more familiar to America’s elites because they once made their teenagers work summer jobs. Many of my friends who are now in positions of authority and power in Washington and elsewhere spent summers doing plumbing, mowing lawns, or bagging groceries. It gave us muscle memory we would have for the rest of our lives.
When the economic difficulties hit journalism with the rise of the internet and free everything, I was ready. I do feel bad for the government workers you see on social media crying and picketing to get their old jobs back and tearfully explaining that they’ve been with the Department of Useless Paper Pushing for 50 years and don’t know how to do anything else. Yet I’m also here to tell them: Pick up a broom and get to work. It can be the gateway to a fresh new world.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.